40 Under 40

Brandon Brown credits role-playing with his wife as one of the keys to his success as Coastal Nissan’s sales manager. 

Most mornings, Brown rehearses possible sales scenarios with his wife, Heather, before driving to work at Coastal Nissan on Pawleys Island, S.C. 

“I practice with my scripts with her all the time. I’m obsessive about it,” he said. 

His use of sales scripts helped Coastal Nissan’s sales volume rise 133 percent in one year, increasing to 892 vehicles sold in 2022 from 672 in 2021, Brown said. 

Coastal Nissan also became the first store in Coastal Chevrolet- Cadillac-Nissan Inc.’s 43-year history to sell over 100 vehicles in one month and have one salesperson sell 50 cars in one month, he said. 

As a newcomer to the car industry in 2012, Brown struggled to close sales without scripts. 

“The first three years, man, I did not know what I was doing at all,” he said. “I would get kind of fussed at by people that were in charge of me for not closing a deal or not handling the customer right.” 

Brown realized most car sales representatives struggled with those skills. 

“One day, this manager I had said, go close it and I replied, well, I’m not that good at it, I’ll just watch you do it since you’re good at it, and the look on his face was he was just found out, caught,” he said. 

His manager attempted to close the deal with the customer and failed, Brown said. 

“I just thought, man, if he does not know what he’s doing and he’s in charge of me, how am I ever going to know what I am doing?” he said. 

After that experience, Brown decided to attend sales classes given by Tom Stuker, the star of Spike TV’s short-lived reality television series “Car Lot Rescue.” 

“I went to his school in Las Vegas and learned how to get sales referrals,” Brown said.

“There were 39 people in that class and at the end of the three days I got the third-most number of referrals, it was the first success I ever had in the car business.” 

His success after taking Stuker’s class led him to seek more sales training courses. 

In 2017, Brown took motivational speaker and real estate investor Grant Cardone’s sales class. 

“It was a great awakening for me,” Brown said of Cardone’s class. “I had discovered my purpose in life. It was to help people, and I sold 23 cars the first month after that class.” 

Some of Brown’s colleagues thought his first time selling 23 cars in a month was a fluke but, in subsequent months, his sales continued to hover around that number. 

In Stuker’s and Cardone’s courses, Brown learned how scripts could help him increase his sales numbers, but he also learned how being more upfront and honest could help improve the bottom line. 

When he returned from those courses, Brown said he imparted those lessons to his co-workers. 

“The car business teaches you to be shady because the people teach you to be shady,” he said. “I was being a lot more upfront and transparent with customers and that’s how I want to be anyway.” 

— Karn Dhingra